Faithful hold palm fronds and a crucifix during a Palm Sunday Mass at the Baby Jesus Church in Bogota, Colombia. / Fernando Vergara, AP

by Stephen Mansfield , USA TODAY

by Stephen Mansfield , USA TODAY

In the 1950s and early 1960s, trend-setting comedian Lenny Bruce often said, "If Jesus had been killed 20 years ago, Catholic schoolchildren would be wearing little electric chairs around their necks instead of crosses."

Bruce was right that any device used to kill Jesus Christ in any age would have become a symbol, of both divine judgment and divine deliverance, to the faithful. What Bruce did not get right was his assumption that the cross of the first century was equal to the electric chair of the 20th, that both were meant only to execute. The truth is that the cross was a Roman tool of torture before it was a tool of death. It was meant to inflict such horrible suffering on a single man that an entire nation was made to cower.

This is a truth that ought to condition attitudes toward torture today, particularly among those who regard Jesus as God. It means that there is a direct connection between the events of that first Good Friday and the torture depicted in the recent film Zero Dark Thirty, that there is a line to be drawn between Guantanamo Bay and Golgotha, between the evils of Bashar Assad, president of Syria, and the evils of Pontius Pilate, governor of Judea.

In the Roman mind, crucifixion was an act of state terror. By the time of Jesus, the ancient world had already tried dealing with its undesirables by boiling them in oil, stoning them, strangling them, drowning them and setting them on fire. All these brought on death too quickly. Officials wanted a method of killing that was so slow and terrifying that no onlooker missed the implied threat.

Scholars are unsure which ancient culture introduced the Romans to crucifixion. What is certain that once they learned of it, they improved upon it and made it a tool of the empire. In answer to the final slave revolt under Spartacus in 71 B.C., the empire crucified 6,000 rebels, famously lining the road from Rome to Capua with crosses. During the siege of Jerusalem in A.D. 70, the Romans crucified as many as 500 rebels a day.

The Romans had no such scruples. It is why sometime about A.D. 30, Jesus of Nazareth spent six hours gasping wide-eyed for breath while soldiers gambled for his clothes and onlookers urged him to get on with dying. This was as Rome intended: a cruel death meant not merely to kill a man but to kill the spirit of a nation, to end not just a single Jew but the threat that any Jew might pose to the empire.

We should see the ancient Roman zeal for crucifixion as one with its later zeal for the cruelties of the gladiators' games and, ultimately, as one with the hardening and barbarity of an entire people. Torture as martial technique led to torture as entertainment and eventually to torture as commonplace. Nobility died in this progression, then compassion and, finally, the empire itself.

It could very well be the same in our own time. While there is certainly a place for aggressive interrogation, even deception and the intimidation of captives, in the conduct of a just war, dehumanizing torture produces a dehumanized people and undermines noble principles that might have, at first, given legitimacy to the war.

Those who worship Jesus ought to be the greatest opponents of the kind of tortures he endured. If their faith grows from the soil of the Jewish law, and if they remember what their ancestors endured at the hand of Rome and a hundred other persecutors, they will stand against the similar violation of the image of God in man today.

Torture is not merely an issue of political left or right, or military vs. civilian opinion. It is an issue that grows from the nature of man, from the principled vision of a nation and from the highest of religious truth.

There is no better time to assert this than during the season in which we ponder the torture and death of Jesus.

There is certainly no better time to assert this than the present moment in our nation's history, in which we hope to learn from the excesses of our recent wars.

Stephen Mansfield is author of the forthcoming book, Killing Jesus: The Unknown Conspiracy Behind the World's Most Famous Execution.

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